The Damned's Journey
by Plume d'un souffle
Summary: One-shot. What happened to Theo between 5x20 and 6x6.


The Damned's Journey

Theo fell, his sister's grip on his ankle, pulling him with her. Their weight accelerated his fall.

"Scott... Scott... Scott..."

The echo of his last cry ricochets in the atmosphere of the living, slipping between the brown stalactites of the ceiling. Now, they were only small sparkling dots like stars in hell's sky.

A few hundred miles away and a few days passed - it seemed so to him - he began to breathe with difficulty and his supernatural eyes lit up. A stinging heat had begun to gnaw at his legs. It was as if he had dipped into a too-hot bath. Blisters then began to spread throughout his body and - _boom_! - he struck an invisible wall, which caused some to burst.

Orange. Red. Fire.

Theo was suspended in the void, lying face down on invisible solid. His body healed, opened and healed again under the effect of burns. Only his nose, neck, right shoulder and right leg returned to their normal bone formation. He was soaked with sweat, stained with blood and a little of his skin was stuck on his clothes which seemed to blend into him. However, he counted himself fortunate not to have landed in lava. Lower, burnt bodies burn for eternity, accustomed to pain, resembling zombies. Without lips. White, globular eyes. They watched Theo suffer, stretched out their hands toward the living man who still had a chance. But he doesn't know that. Not yet.

Black.

Heavy darkness causes Theo difficulty to breathe. The air had shifted to almost-tar. But the cries hadn't stopped. Heart-wrenching screams of the condemned, who pay for their crimes, numbed his refined hearing. He had a headache. He wanted to take his head in both hands, press on his ears, but a rattling metal restricted him.

"It's time for the operation."

His sister's voice. So close, so distant. Mocking. Happy?

A violent blow to the heart. Theo didn't have time to yell.

Thirst.

He suffocated in the prison of the chains he couldn't break. Blood flowed from his lips, almost enabling him to breathe, rising in his nose. He was groaning. He had undergone his medicinal transformation three times. His ears were bleeding from the sufferers' cries, powerful like a banshee. He didn't remain deaf since his chimera's status took care of all his injuries. His eyes tingled when the darkness dissipated. He breathed a little better but blinked his eyes many times to drive away the blindness caused by the sight of the fire that lay beneath him.

"It's not finished."

Theo groans.

"You will suffer all the deaths of the lives you've taken and whenever darkness fill hell's cavities you will endure the operation that made you a supernatural being. Now let begin... With me!"

His sister, with greasy black hair and cadaverous pallor, plunged her fingers into the young man's chest.

Theo uttered his last howl before losing his voice.

Poison's smell. Calcination's smell. Here time does not exist. Theo isn't dead yet. He'll remain in hell until someone releases him. His sister told him: he can only die on earth, in the haven of permissible mistakes, in the in-between.

Tired.

Hell is for the dead, not for the living. It's why it was one million times worse for Theo. Sometimes, the darkness comes for several days to deprive those who still enjoy the gift of sight. They suffer in silence without seeing their punishment like Theo. He suffered relentlessly, without a break... nothing. And now he just finished to suffer Josh's death that lightning illuminated the top of his head and he heard the rumble of the ceiling that had opened.

How many days had passed? He didn't know. Months? Years maybe? A breath of freshness slipped to him and he lost his balance. Theo thought he was going to fall into the lava, but as his face shredded in shreds of skin and brushed against the fingers of the punished, he was sucked up. The speed of his ascent was alarming, but he had time to heal completely. A few meters from the exit, he meets Scott's and Liam's eyes. He smiled at them, breathless, happy and weeping with relief.

THE END


End file.
